This week, news broke that Meta had settled with 47 state attorneys general who jointly sued it for knowingly addicting kids to its platforms. The agreement sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, and among those working on technology and child safety across the nation.
Those who were too far out of the range of the quake to feel it immediately will feel its aftershocks soon. While the financial amount that Meta agreed to pay the states may seem modest (approximately $18 billion), the details of the settlement are anything but: In short, Meta agreed to implement many of the demands of the tech safety movement, including some policy objectives, like age verification to open a social media account, which the Institute for Family Studies helped pioneer.
I’ll admit it: my eyes welled up with tears when the news broke. I felt joy, built on a sense of vindication, as I thought of the children driven to suicide or self-harm by social media, the victims of cyberbullying, and those whose entire childhoods had been worn down by the relentless undertow of algorithms that drove them into the grip of predation and abuse at scale. Finally, their voices have been heard.
Both the children and their parents have been begging, Please, no more! With this settlement, we are starting to see the shape of, no more.
There are many people who made this happen and deserve credit. First, we owe thanks to the parents who never, ever gave up. If you are reading this, God bless you. For the brave former Meta employees turned whistleblowers, the activists who worked tirelessly, the social psychologists who documented the harms, the thinkers who crafted the policy remedies, the lawmakers who finally did something about it, and the attorneys general who fought for this result, this was a moment of relief, vindication, and, indeed, justice. Once strangers, we are now friends who have built a powerful movement. We have not yet fully won, but we are winning. Fortunately, with successes like this, our movement will grow.
What does winning look like? At the Institute for Family Studies, we call it the “double layer of protection.” The backbone of child safety in the digital age, as a technical matter, must be age verification applied at two levels: the platform level and the app-store level. The other remedies, such as default time limits, night mode, school mode, etc., must flow through that. But knowing the age of the user is critical to effectively implement these other measures. Fortunately, Meta’s agreement solves that problem, by requiring them to use age verification systems with a false positive threshold of 3% for minors ages 13-15 and 10% for those ages 16-17. Unlike Australia’s social media law, which requires no accuracy threshold whatsoever, this will effectively identify the vast majority of adolescent users on these platforms.
While these provisions are important, they do not go far enough. Despite how hard parents across the country have fought for this result, the rights of parents have been left entirely unfortified.
Parental consent must be the anchor of a child’s power to access a social media account.
As the history of this movement shows, we must have parents more involved. This will ruffle the feathers of some in our movement, but parental consent must be the anchor of a child’s power to access a social media account. Nothing in Meta’s settlement agreement requires that. This is a critical omission. As Meg Leta Jones has written, “Teen consent serves only platforms by allowing them to maintain access to teenage users and data without any real friction.”
Meta deserves no kudos for being forced to do the right thing under the gun, but we should not forget that many other social media platforms are also harming children. We need to apply these same measures to all social media platforms.
Meta’s knowing abuse of children is well documented—but there are many other offenders. We need legislation that codifies this settlement and generalizes these protections across all social media platforms. We need Congress to enact the Kids Online Safety Act, the App Store Accountability Act, the Guard Act, and the SCREEN Act, along with a bill that seriously codifies (and strengthens) Meta’s agreement and applies it to other platforms.
In August 2022, the Institute for Family Studies—alongside partners at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Center for Renewing America—released a policy brief, “Protecting Teens from Big Tech,” the very first policy paper calling for age verification of social media. Less than a year later, this paper inspired a law in Utah, the first state in the country to require age verification for young Americans to open a social media account. In October 2023, we released model legislation with our partners based on the above paper that codified these recommendations into bill language. Several states enacted laws inspired by these ideas and texts, and, subsequently, Big Tech trade associations tried to stop them in court.
While the process in the courts has been griding and slow, we have never stopped believing in these remedies. In fact, IFS co-authored the first policy paper that called for app-store level age verification protections, as well. While some groups and companies like Meta saw these ideas as competitive with each other, we continued to call for both remedies, describing them, as noted above, as “the double layer of protection.”
Now, with this settlement in California, Meta has agreed to implement the measures we have been fighting for—alongside many others. This is a huge win for America’s children and families, and the mass movement that helped produce this result deserves all our thanks. We at IFS are grateful to have been a part of what has turned into something far greater than we could have possibly imagined. But the job is not done. We need the double layer of protection now.
Michael Toscano is Senior Fellow, Director of the Family First Technology Initiative for the Institute for Family Studies.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
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by Michael Toscano
This week, news broke that Meta had settled with 47 state attorneys general who jointly sued it for knowingly addicting kids to its platforms. The agreement sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, and among those working on technology and child safety across the nation.
Those who were too far out of the range of the quake to feel it immediately will feel its aftershocks soon. While the financial amount that Meta agreed to pay the states may seem modest (approximately $18 billion), the details of the settlement are anything but: In short, Meta agreed to implement many of the demands of the tech safety movement, including some policy objectives, like age verification to open a social media account, which the Institute for Family Studies helped pioneer.
I’ll admit it: my eyes welled up with tears when the news broke. I felt joy, built on a sense of vindication, as I thought of the children driven to suicide or self-harm by social media, the victims of cyberbullying, and those whose entire childhoods had been worn down by the relentless undertow of algorithms that drove them into the grip of predation and abuse at scale. Finally, their voices have been heard.
Both the children and their parents have been begging, Please, no more! With this settlement, we are starting to see the shape of, no more.
There are many people who made this happen and deserve credit. First, we owe thanks to the parents who never, ever gave up. If you are reading this, God bless you. For the brave former Meta employees turned whistleblowers, the activists who worked tirelessly, the social psychologists who documented the harms, the thinkers who crafted the policy remedies, the lawmakers who finally did something about it, and the attorneys general who fought for this result, this was a moment of relief, vindication, and, indeed, justice. Once strangers, we are now friends who have built a powerful movement. We have not yet fully won, but we are winning. Fortunately, with successes like this, our movement will grow.
What does winning look like? At the Institute for Family Studies, we call it the “double layer of protection.” The backbone of child safety in the digital age, as a technical matter, must be age verification applied at two levels: the platform level and the app-store level. The other remedies, such as default time limits, night mode, school mode, etc., must flow through that. But knowing the age of the user is critical to effectively implement these other measures. Fortunately, Meta’s agreement solves that problem, by requiring them to use age verification systems with a false positive threshold of 3% for minors ages 13-15 and 10% for those ages 16-17. Unlike Australia’s social media law, which requires no accuracy threshold wh
